Wings Over Scotland

It must be bewildering being the SNP sometimes.

You win a historic third election with a second massive landslide, getting more than twice as many seats as your nearest challenger – the first time such a thing has ever happened in a Holyrood election – on the back of what’s (self-evidently) by and large a very popular policy programme and record, and before you’ve even taken your seats in the chamber all the parties you just thrashed out of sight line up to explain how you’ve been doing everything wrong.

And as alliances go, they don’t get much less holy.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’re supposed to be taking a few days off, but it’s been tipping it down outside for 36 solid hours, so when an alert reader emailed us a question relating to this article from Monday, we couldn’t help but go and research it just to pass some time.

They’d asked how many of the Tory MSPs elected last Thursday had been rejected by the voters of a constituency seat on the same day, and we were startled by the answer – of the 24 Conservative members of the Scottish Parliament elected on the list last week, every single one was also a failed constituency candidate.

And that got us thinking.

Read the rest of this entry →

The social-media reaction to this post yesterday was astonishing. Merely pointing out calmly and quietly that our warnings before the election had been entirely vindicated, and that everyone else’s unequivocal assertions of a guaranteed SNP majority had been the rubbish we always said they were, unleashed a torrent of abuse equal to any we’ve ever endured in the last four and a half years – distinguished only by the fact that so much of this one came from supposed Yes supporters.

But no amount of screaming and shouting will change the facts. Let’s look at them.

Read the rest of this entry →

The first (and from our perspective, most important) thing to note is that independence is now categorically and unequivocally off the table for at least half a decade.

The failure of the SNP to secure another Holyrood majority last night (for the want of just 360 votes) combined with the Greens’ weasel-worded opposition to a second referendum – and make no mistake, opposition is what it is – will ensure that even if the rUK votes to leave the EU and Scotland votes overwhelmingly to stay in, there will be no indyref before the next Holyrood election in 2021.

Whatever else happens, you can take that to the bank.

Read the rest of this entry →

Polling day is here.

But there’s more to today’s election than the fate of Kezia Dugdale.

Read the rest of this entry →

In so far as this Holyrood election has been a battle at all, the battleground for it has been tax. Not only the Unionist opposition but the pro-indy left have attacked the SNP for timidity over its plans to keep income tax rates the same as the rest of the UK, with only a tweak on the threshold for the top rate.

In their defence the Nats have deployed a line that’s been widely derided as an old Tory argument derived from the so-called “Laffer curve”, but in fact is nothing of the sort. It centres around the ways wealthy people legally shield their income from tax, but there’s a very specific and very important wrinkle that applies only in the particular case of a devolved, not independent, Scotland.

It’s not at all complicated but it’s absolutely crucial, and it’s barely been discussed on even the most superficial level in any supposed analyses of the situation undertaken in the media, so as usual we suppose it’s going to be down to us to do the job.

Read the rest of this entry →

The rise of the SNP has so bewildered the metropolitan commentariat that even almost a decade after the party won its first Scottish election pundits still barely know which way to face to confront it. A case in point can be found in today’s Times.

That was a quick switch.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s been quite a 24 hours for watchers of the UK media. The Sunday papers saw two of the most demented rants to have been committed to print about Scottish politics since the independence referendum.

One came from Neil Oliver in the Sunday Times – painting a blood-curdling picture of a “second hate-fest” should Scots ever choose to debate the subject again – and the other from Leo McKinstry in the Sunday Express, beside itself with unhinged rage that Scots, having voted to remain in the UK, might exercise their right as UK citizens to also vote to remain in the EU.

(As a result of which we’ve concluded that a narrow rUK vote in favour of Leave being overturned by a huge margin in Scotland for Remain would be the funniest thing that had ever happened in British politics.)

They were joined this morning by David Torrance in the Herald wailing that “Scottish nationalists and Brexiteers have much in common. Both are utterly vacuous” (which readers might feel was a bit rich coming from the unchallenged master of vacuity) and blaming the parlous state of Scottish political discourse mainly on this site and the vile cartoonist Greg Moodie – along, of course, with the ever-dastardly SNP.

Such was the onslaught, in fact, that Fraser “I’d put £1000 on Ed Miliband to win the election” Nelson of the Spectator, of all people, turned up as the voice of reason.

Read the rest of this entry →

Considering we’re only eleven days from a general election, there’s remarkably little politics coverage in the Sunday papers today. Most of what there is is in the Sunday Herald, which has a substantial (and quite entertaining) interview with Kezia Dugdale and another two pages devoted to what’s essentially spluttering attempted justification of its shambolic front-page lead from last week.

We’re not going to go into it in depth, as James Kelly on Scot Goes Pop! has already had a close look and made a pretty fair assessment. But for want of anything more interesting to talk about, and in the wake of some depressing Twitter conversations with people who apparently STILL don’t understand either the Holyrood electoral system or basic arithmetic, we’re going to have one more wade in the list-vote debate.

You might want to see if there’s football on or something.

Read the rest of this entry →

This site has never told readers how to vote in Scottish elections and never will, partly because its editor has no vote there and doesn’t have to live with the consequences whoever wins. (Something that ISN’T true about independence, in which case Wings would relocate to Scotland, which is why we freely express a firm view on that.)

It’s in that context that we make the following observations about next month’s vote.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Sunday Herald, which enjoyed a major sales boost from being the first Scottish newspaper to officially back independence but has since seen its circulation increase partly eroded, has this morning chosen to throw a stick of dynamite onto the fire.

The paper’s front page today teases a double-page spread inside with the headline “SPECIAL REPORT: HOW INDEPENDENCE SUPPORTERS SHOULD USE THEIR SECOND VOTE”. And then things get a little strange.

Read the rest of this entry →

Last weekend’s edition of the Sunday Times gave an article to a Green activist and party worker – not billed as such, even though until last month he was on the party’s regional candidate list for Lothian – to predict that the Greens would get 10 seats at next month’s election.

Much campaigning by the various fringe parties for the Holyrood contest has been based on “seat predictors” like the one deployed to produce the figures in the piece, purporting to show that a tactical-voting strategy on the list can deliver a large gain in numbers of pro-independence MSPs compared to using both votes for the SNP.

We’ve examined that argument in considerable depth already, both theoretical and practical. But its also worth noting that so-called “seat predictors” are a rather shaky basis for making such bold forecasts.

Let’s illustrate that assertion.

Read the rest of this entry →